An evening with Jay Wright

There are two things I don't like talking about with strangers: politics and religion. However, this story won't make much sense without dipping at least a little bit into the latter of those subjects, so I'll start by mentioning that I am a practicing Catholic. How well that practice is going is neither here nor there, however, so let's just move on...

A couple of months ago, the church I regularly attend announced a special guest speaker would be coming: former Villanova men's basketball coach Jay Wright. Wright coached the team from 2001-2022 - building the team into one of the nation's top programs, winning a pair of national championships (with the first one being one of the most famous endings to a basketball game EVER,) and seeing a decent number of players become NBA stars¹ (and was, until last year, probably the most famous person associated with Villanova outside of his players).

I was super interested in it when it was first announced, and it did not disappoint. As you'd probably expect from a top level college coach, Wright was incredibly eloquent - tying elements of his career to leading in local communities. It also provided a very unique perspective on the "behind the scenes" of coaching a college basketball team - case in point: the famous buzzer beater to win the National Championship in 2016.

You can't really see it in this video, but Coach Wright talked a bit about what was going on in the moments after the game-tying shot. I don't remember most of what he said (and I'm not sure if I should discuss some of the details I DO remember), but the big one was the players saying "ATTITUDE" to one another - a way of reminding each other of one of the mantras Wright instilled into them as explained by this slide:

He also talked about his demeanor at the end of the game (because if you notice, he's VERY calm after the winning shot goes in). He said that he felt that he and the players did all they could, and the rest was up to God at that point.

This is probably not something you may have been expecting me to post, and I was on the fence about whether or not I SHOULD post it (especially with how "short" this ended up being), but I cannot stress how cool it was to get to hear someone like Jay Wright speak. He also told me that he liked my hat despite the fact that it was NOT a Villanova hat - it was the Valley Blue Sox of the New England Collegiate Baseball League (who have a cap logo VERY similar to Villanova's logo).